Guests often tell us they spent longer choosing their hotel than booking their flights, and Cape Town does that to people. There are dozens of 5-star hotels here, spread across neighbourhoods that offer quite different holidays, and the booking sites don’t explain the differences. We’ve been hosting visitors in Camps Bay for 25 years, so this is what we tell friends of friends who write to us for advice before a first trip. It starts with the stars themselves, because in South Africa they mean something official.
What 5 Stars Mean in South Africa
The Tourism Grading Council of South Africa is the country’s only official quality assurance body for accommodation, and it assesses every graded property once a year. A property applies, pays for the assessment, gets measured against published criteria for its category, and then gets measured again the following year. Since 2019 the council has run a separate category for boutique hotels, so a nine-room house is judged on its own terms and can hold the same five stars as a 200-room tower. There’s also a level above, called 5 Star Premium, reserved for properties the council considers exceptional. It’s a system with teeth, and it means a 5 star hotel here has been inspected recently by someone with no stake in your booking.
Where to Stay in Cape Town
The city is smaller than the map suggests, and every major sight sits within an hour of everywhere, so the choice of neighbourhood is really a choice of what you’d like outside the front door.
- Camps Bay: the one beach suburb near the city with a full restaurant promenade, backed by the Twelve Apostles and facing west into the sunset. The streets above the strip are quiet and residential.
- V&A Waterfront: the harbour development, with shopping, museums and boat trips on the doorstep, and the crowds that come with them.
- City Bowl: the centre of town, closest to the restaurants and galleries, and the practical pick for a short stay.
How Long to Stay in Cape Town
Allow five nights at a minimum, seven if you can, and stay in one place for all of them. Changing hotels mid-trip costs most of a day each time, between the 11am check-out, the 3pm check-in, and the repacking, and those are daylight hours in one of the world’s better cities to spend daylight in.
What to Ask Before You Book
These are the four things we’d check on any property in the city, ours included:
- The pool’s temperature: the sea at Camps Bay is beautiful and cold all year, so the pool is where most of your swimming will happen, and plenty of pools in this city go unheated. Ours are heated through winter, which we mention because nobody thinks to ask until July.
- What the rate covers: at a 5-star hotel, the price should already include breakfast, WiFi, and taxes, and the difference between properties shows in what gets added beyond that. We pour wine and hand around canapés at sunset every evening, on the house.
- How you’ll get around: Cape Town’s sights are spread out, and a hotel with its own cars and drivers makes easy day trips of the Winelands, Cape Point and the penguins.
- The room count: nine rooms means staff who know your coffee order by the second morning. It also means booking months ahead for high season, because small properties fill from the far end of the calendar.
Staying With Us in Camps Bay
Atlanticview Cape Town Boutique Hotel has nine rooms and suites above the Camps Bay greenbelt, with 180-degree views across Table Mountain, the Twelve Apostles and the Atlantic. We’ve hosted guests here for 25 years. The infinity pools are heated, the sunset wine is poured nightly, our drivers go wherever you’re going, and booking directly through our website carries the best rates.